Wednesday, October 19, 2005

And I'll bet you can't either. While trying to find "A n B Stationery" in my local telephone book, I suddenly realized that I have no idea what conventions the phone-book-makers use to deal with initials, spaces, numbers, and non-letter symbols.

Is this a major lacuna in my education, or are others just as confused as I am? To find out, I have created an alphabetization test. I collected the following ten entries from my phone book, presented here in random order. Every entry appears exactly as it did in the phone book, including all spaces and punctuation (or lack thereof). Your assignment, should you choose to take it: place them in the order they appeared in the phone book, first to last.

I'm offering a prize (as yet unselected, value less than $20) for the first person to give me the correct answer, in the comments or by email. Limit: 3 entries per person, one at a time. You can even cheat by using the phone book (but I won't tell you which one I used). I'll reveal the correct answer if I haven't heard it in one week.

Incidentally, I have developed a hypothesis about the alphabetization scheme, but I won't let on just yet. I'll post an update or comment later.

UPDATE: D'oh. The final entry in the list should be A & A Auto Performance Inc., not A & Auto Peformance Inc. I've corrected it now. But even ignoring that entry, all of people's guesses thus far have been incorrect.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the number for "A Two Girl Experience" and called it. I'm sorry to report the experience wasn't anything more than curious. Curious because after dialing the number, I heard a voice recording telling me I had reached a completely different number! I double-checked the number and redialed with the same results each time. These people must have more business than they know what to do with because you're only told the number you supposedly dialed and "thank you," but never given the opportunity to leave a message. Maybe it's their way of teasing their clients... not that I know anything about them.

The harder alphabetization test I saw once was for books in a library, and it included Victor Hugo's novel 1793, which had to be sorted by the french colloquial spelling of the year 1793. (We don't say "one thousand seven hundred ninety three" when pronouncing year names, and neither do they.)

I would have gotten something similar to 'kissmesoftly' except the placement of A Auto Emergency and A & Auto Performance. Databases I've seen in access, if i remember correctly, seem to sort the order this way as someone mentioned earlier: Symbols (&)>numbers>letters>words.But you said kissmesoftly is wrong and chris is close. hmm...

Glen, piece of cake. Since software obviously does their alphabetiztion, standardized numerical character assignments will govern the order. So, to solve your problem, I plugged the list into Excel and sorted it. Here it is:

Assuming of course everyone is using the same collation. Do you know the name of the collation you are using? Usually Latin1_General Case Insensitive Accent Sensitive is the standard collation used in the US, but SQL supports 39 lingual collations and binary collation, for a total of 40 collations. That's not including the back-compatability collations. With Yukon (SQL2005) You might have more, but I don't have that info handy right now.

Z suggested reading "A 2 Z" as "A to Z". I like that suggestion, but if it's true, then the phone company could have converted it to "A-Z", and my book treats the dash as a null like the ampersand. That gives